


A Fry Cook On Venus

by Prismatic Bell (Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor)



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | All Media Types, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: A relevant one however, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Gen, I'm sorry the title is a bit misleading it's a movie quote, Kid Fic, Other, Playing Hooky, Universe Alteration, Zoisite is surprisingly good with kids, it probably has to do with him pretty much being one, this story has zero percent to do with Sailor Venus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-23
Updated: 2014-10-23
Packaged: 2018-02-22 07:11:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2499155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor/pseuds/Prismatic%20Bell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zoisite and Chibi-Usa play hookey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Fry Cook On Venus

**Author's Note:**

> OKAY SO. If the weird character combo twice in a row hasn't already clued you in, iiiiiiiiiit's a series now. The basic backstory here is that when Usagi and Mamoru married and Silver Millennium was reborn, so were the Shitennou. There's a lot more to it than that, but that's really all you need for this particular fic. It's set after the beginning of Crystal Tokyo, but before Pharaoh 90's attack (and it's animanga in its best form, i.e., I cherrypicked the metacanon to make a fun series).
> 
> A couple of other random notes:
> 
> As with the last fic, "babi" is a title in Zoisite's mother tongue analogous to aunt or uncle, but without the gender connotation. 
> 
> Zoisite continues to be not human.
> 
> This is actually set before _Castle in a Castle_ , where Chibi-Usa is ~7 (physical and mental age not matching up notwithstanding). She's about five here.
> 
> Although I use "Chibi-Usa" in prose for the sake of clarity, "Chibi-Usa" literally means "little Usagi." (Usagi named her kid after herself. Or more likely, Mamoru did.) I tend to assume having to live up to being just a "little" carrier of her mother's birth name is one of the things that left Chibi-Usa so badly scarred the first time we meet her, but to the Shitennou, her mother has never been Usagi. They know her by that name as Sailor Moon, but as the Princess and later as the Queen? She's always been Serenity to them. When you see a Shitennou using "Usagi" in this series, you can assume by default they mean Chibi-Usa. Zoisite occasionally expands for clarity referring to them as "Serenity Moonborn" and "Usagi Moonborn," but not in this fic.
> 
> My many thanks to the person on Tumblr who gave me Hello Kitty's description.
> 
> I THINK THAT'S IT, HERE WE GO

“No.”

“Twenty minutes.”

“No.”

“An hour, tops.”

“Did you hear me?”

“You're a lifesaver, Zoisite.”

“No!”

“I'll pick her up after the meeting, I've got to go, thanks!”

Ami pecks his cheek and darts out, and he swivels in his chair to stare after her.

“I want you to know _I didn't consent to any of this!_ ”

Behind him, Chibi-Usa swings her legs and giggles.

“Does she _like_ you?”

“Of course she does, everyone likes me.” Not counting Nephrite. Or Mars. Or Jupiter. Or pretty much anyone who's ever pissed him off enough to make himself noticeably taller. But they're outliers, really. A few thousand people, tops. Maybe a million. 

“Does she _like_ -like you?”

“She'd best not,” he comments, absently, and pushes his hair out of his face. Ami _would_ drop the palace brat with him on a day he needed to catch up on guard plans. Not his fault, really. Kunzite came home early and kept him up late, and Nephrite and Jadeite stopped questioning the validity of this claim as “vital” after he went to Serenity and asked _her_ to explain the importance of a happy home life.

Neither of them looked at Mamoru for a good week after. Not his fault.

“Do you think she's got cooooooooooties?”

“No. I'm fond of her. But I also have—“

“Babi Zoisite and Aunt Ami-chan! Sitting in a tr—“

Zoisite covers her mouth with one hand and rubs his temples with the other, and glances at the clock. It's been two minutes.

“As I was saying, I have a husband, and I don't think he'd appreciate me bringing home a girlfriend.”

“Mommy does,” Chibi-Usa says, and Zoisite very nearly chokes on air. “She said she and Venus are—“

“You should _not_ be repeating that,” Zoisite scolds her. “You can draw in one of my books if you want, there's a stack in the corner. Just don't take the top one.”

She wanders to his corner and pulls a pad from the middle of the stack. It wobbles, and Zoisite takes a sharp breath—but it stays. He looks away before he can see what she's doing to his pencils. He doesn't want to know. It's not that he doesn't like her. It's that there are things he's okay with in his workspace, and things that should never enter it, and a bored Chibi-Usa is definitely one of the latter things.

“Who's your husband?”

Zoisite nearly spills his hot chocolate on his work. “What?”

“You're married.”

“Yes.”

“To who?”

To _whom,_ Zoisite thinks. He navigates Japanese better than she and he didn't even start speaking it until he was a few thousand years old. He bites his tongue.

“Kunzite.”

There's a clatter from the corner, and he turns around in time to see a pair of horrified brown eyes staring over the top of one of his pads and his entire cup of pencils scattered over the floor. Of course.

“He's _scary!_ ”

Zoisite smiles in spite of himself. “No, he's not.”

“He is, he really is!”

“No, he—“ Zoisite almost says something he shouldn't about how nobody is quite as frightening with their trousers off. Then he realizes if he does he's going to have to explain it to Ami. “He uses so much sugar in his coffee I don't even bother having mine until his is done because I can pour mine in his empty cup and use the sugar that didn't mix in, and it's still sweet. He's not scary.”

Chibi-Usa stares. Then she lowers the drawing pad. Then she starts to giggle. Zoisite offers her a brief smile and goes back to his work.

“Babi Zoisite?”

Zoisite doesn't slam his pen on the paper. Someone ought to be proud of him. “Yes?”

“How old were you when you started doing magic?”

He almost fires off a smart comment—something in the vein of _older than my hair and younger than my teeth_ —and then he stops and looks up. Chibi-Usa is staring back at him, eyes troubled, smile gone. 

“I wasn't yet school-age the first time,” he says, and watches her face fall further. “But it happened only once, and by the time it happened again I'd had my growth already.”

“You what?”

Zoisite frowns and thinks. “I mean . . . ” What he means, he thinks, is that—in the wonderfully-expressive words Nephrite picked up in Wisconsin during their tenure for Beryl in those terrible dark days—Japanese can _bite him_. “I mean I wasn't a child anymore.”

“Oh.” She pushes a pencil listlessly across the paper. “Is that why you're one of Daddy's guards?”

“What?”

“Magic. Like the Sailor Senshi.”

“No,” he says, and suddenly realizes just how carefully he needs to measure his words. “No, things were very different then.”

“Oh.”

“I know your mother was fourteen the first time she used magic,” he tells her, and Chibi-Usa looks up, mouth agape. The last of Zoisite's unbroken pencils falls out of her hand and hits the floor.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Do you _swear?_ ”

“By my land and honor.”

“You say really funny stuff,” she tells him, and hops off her chair. “Do you have any toys?”

Someone, Zoisite thinks, is going to owe him _so many things_ for controlling his tongue today. “Not here.” He gives his work one last glance and then looks back at Chibi-Usa. “Go get a sweater.”

\-------------

“—and she's friends with Pochacco,” Chibi-Usa says, and when she pauses to take a breath Zoisite finally breaks in.

“That's the dog.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Cats and dogs hate each other,” he protests.

“Hello Kitty isn't a cat, she's a _friend,_ ” Chibi-Usa chides him. “She just looks like a cat.”

Zoisite decides it's best for his mental health to switch over to uh-huh and hmm instead of actually trying to understand the cheerful, twittering monologue coming from his side. Chibi-Usa swings their joined hands and looks up at the sign over their heads. 

“There's a _ball pit_ here?”

“Yes.” Zoisite has definitely never been in it. Ever.

Not even that one time at night when nobody else was in here and they were definitely just sweeping the place for youma.

“Can we go? _Please?_ ”

“If I say yes, will you stop trying to pull my arm right off my shoulder?”

Chibi-Usa lets go of his hand and darts down the hall with a jubilant yell. Zoisite takes off after her, Sanrio bag slapping against his leg, diving between people and leaving a trail of shrieks and startled cries behind him. He disregards all of them; travel to and from the North Kingdom is routine, people should know by now to get out of the way when a faechild starts running.

By the time he has an arm around her waist and lifts her squealing from the floor he's actually winded. Part of it is the diving in and out between people too slow to give him space; part of it, he suspects, is that ginzuishou or no ginzuishou he's not sixteen anymore, something that still shocks him when it occurs to him.

“Did you hear me tell you to stop?”

She shakes her head. Zoisite almost tells her they're leaving. Then she sniffles. There are tears in her eyes. He gives her his best I'm-an-unimpressed-adult look.

Her lip wobbles.

She _had_ to learn a trick that evil from him. He clamps a hand on her shoulder—carefully. “Let's go. Stay close to me this time.”

“What if people ask if I'm the princess?”

“You say you're here having a play. Princesses can play in ball pits too.”

She's into the pit as soon as her shoes are off, and Zoisite settles into a seat and pulls out his PDA. He's actually surprised it hasn't gone off yet.

Bingo.

“She's in one piece, I've been worse, we'll be back in time for dinner,” he says, before the PDA can even actually ring. Serenity's voice shrills out at him.

“We're at the mall,” he tells her. “She's in the ball pit.”

Behind her, he hears Minako's voice saying there's only one mall in walking distance that has a ball pit, and he sighs as Serenity says _stay where you are_ in what he assumes is supposed to be a menacing voice.

Chibi-Usa laughs loudly enough to draw his attention. She's sitting in the ball pit with a blue-haired girl who apparently tells extremely funny jokes. Zoisite smiles.

Then he hears running footsteps and a trail of murmurs, and an angry Queen in leggings and a genuinely hideous sweater appears in front of him. Zoisite wonders vaguely if it was Mamoru's, and shrank in the wash.

“She's fine,” he says, before Serenity can get a word out. Sometimes it stops the lectures.

“She could've _not_ been, Zoisite, how can you be this irresponsible?”

But only sometimes.

“A five-year-old can't go to the mall?”

“She's—!” Zoisite gestures at her. People are staring, because of course they are; the woman he first met in this life as Tsukino Usagi isn't exactly _subtle_ with her hair and bright clothes, and he's sure something about her loud turquoise tights will show up in the supermarket rags next week, accompanied by terrible holophone pictures. But there's no need to shout classified information all over a public space. Serenity shuts her mouth and glares, but when she opens it her voice is significantly softer. “Now isn't a good time. You know that.”

“She doesn't. And the last time I checked it's my job to make sure it stays that way.”

“Mama?”

Zoisite doesn't look at her. She's going to look resigned, ready to be escorted back to the palace and away from the girl with the blue hair, and he's not sure he can take it. 

“Can Pála come too?”

“Who?”

Serenity actually stutters in surprise, and Zoisite can't blame her. He's pretty sure he's never heard Chibi-Usa ask for a person who's not Pluto or her father in her entire life. She points into the ball enclosure.

“Her family came from Iceland and she doesn't have any friends either.”

There's a woman standing across the enclosure staring uneasily at them all. Zoisite wonders if she knows who they are. He's seen it before—and always, always, _always_ it's people assuming Serenity will be taller. He's even gotten it directed at himself a few times, and it always makes him wonder just how tall people assume Kunzite is. He waves a hand at the woman.

“ _Do you speak English?_ ”

The woman nods, crosses the enclosure. She looks like the kind of person Zoisite sorts into the _less than a year_ category—those who haven't yet learned to navigate Crystal Tokyo and its unique energy. She holds out a hand, hesitates, pulls it back, holds it out again. Zoisite takes pity on her and shakes her hand, shooing Chibi-Usa back to the ball pit with the other. Serenity bows.

“Elísabet,” the woman says, and nods at Chibi-Usa. “ _You are her parents?_ ”

Zoisite laughs and shakes his head before translating. He can't help it. 

“I'm her mother.”

He pays only the most absent of attentions to the conversation he's translating back and forth. Chibi-Usa is showing her new necklace to Pála, who dips a hand into her shirt to pull out some silly little bauble of her own. Zoisite hopes they enjoy it while they've got it. And then the words he just relayed to Elísabet actually sink in: _get them together again sometime._

“The gardens are open, you know,” he comments, and after a moment's pause Serenity nods.

“Tell her, please.”

“ _What gardens?_ ”

“ _On the palace grounds,_ ” Zoisite says, and then her mouth drops and her hand comes up to cover it like she's not even aware she's done it. There's a squeal behind them.

“ _I_ love _Pochacco! He's my favorite!_ ”

“ _That's it, she's adopted,_ ” Zoisite comments. He repeats himself for Serenity's benefit, and both women start laughing. A miracle.

“What's a Pochacco?”

“A friend that isn't actually a dog. Or maybe it is a dog and Hello Kitty is the only one that's not actually an animal. Or I may be losing my mind,” Zoisite offers. “ _Do you have any idea what Pochacco is?_ ”

Elísabet laughs. “ _I do not understand it either._ ” She looks at her phone and calls across the play area. Zoisite hears Pála's name, but can't make sense of the rest. Elísabet looks back at them regretfully.

“ _Dinner,_ ” she says. “ _Her father will be home soon._ ”

“ _It's nice to meet you,_ ” Serenity offers, and Zoisite stares. Something new: he didn't know Serenity could speak any English, no matter how limited. 

He's also pretty sure Serenity just wrote a phone number—probably Ami's or Minako's—on Elísabet's hand. And she calls him irresponsible. 

“Usagi-chan!” He's probably not loud enough over the din of yelling children, but he sees a pair of large brown eyes look up in his direction at once.

Serenity stares at him. He stares back. “Yes?”

She smiles and shakes her head. “It's a little strange hearing it again, is all.”

He almost says something about how he's always called the Princess that—or sometimes Little Rabbit, in his own tongue—but then Chibi-Usa slams into his legs. Zoisite bends his knees before her head can slam into something more sensitive than his stomach.

“Pála said we can play again,” she says. “Can we?”

“Not today,” Serenity tells her. Chibi-Usa's shoulders slump. “But I have her mother's phone number, so sometime soon.”

Zoisite watches her mouth fall open. “ _Really?_ ” 

“Really,” Serenity agrees. Then she gets down to her knees. “Is that a new necklace? It's so cool!”

Zoisite considers telling her she doesn't want to ask about the necklace. Then he considers what kind of rant he's going to get from Ami when they get back to the palace.

He wanders a few feet away—enough to give them their space together, but not so far anybody else might get ideas—and leans against the wall, crosses one foot over the other. It's an old motion, casual and nearly unconscious, even, but he feels a dozen pairs of eyes go to his boots and then dart away again. _Zoisite Shitennou._ He doesn't have to read minds like Nephrite to hear the thought as conversation dims before picking back up again. They no longer wear the old uniform—relics of a distant and terrible time—but the new one is just as recognizable, and even though Zoisite's in a kilt and a sweatshirt he has no doubt he's been recognized as one of Endymion's guard on his day off.

He pulls out his PDA again and scrolls through his messages—two from North Kingdom friends taking baby steps into the 22nd century with their first phones, a dinner message from Kunzite, an ad for—he reads it again, in case he missed something, then rolls his eyes—a sale on bottled water, like he doesn't live under a perfectly drinkable waterfall. Idiots. 

There's also a little blinking dot next to a message from Ami: _when are you coming back????_ Four question marks—she must, he thinks, actually be worried. Not his fault.

 

He shifts his weight against the wall and shoots a casual glance back at Serenity and Chibi-Usa. They're still talking cheap kiddie jewelry. And everybody here saw that glance, but nobody will say so. Good.

 _Twenty minutes,_ he types. He waits for the little blinking circle to come up that tells him Ami is typing back. Then he grins at the screen and hits send.

_An hour, tops._


End file.
